“I thought myself to commit an unpardonable error, to have murdered the same in the waste bottoms of my chests … further considering so little a trifle cannot procure so great a breach of our amity … and when you examine yourself what doth avail a mass of gold to be continually imprisoned in your bags, and never to be employed to your use … What do they avail, if you do not participate them to others … So you being sick of too much doubt in your own proceedings, through which infirmity you are desirous to bury and insevill your works in the grave of oblivion … “ – Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, in his prefatory letter to Thomas Bedingfield’s translation of Cardanus Comforte in 1573 from Italian into English.
Girolamo Cardano (1501-1576) the Italian philosopher and author of "Cardanus Comforte," was still alive when Oxford was in Italy during 1575-1576
The 23-year-old earl created an elaborate “excuse” for publishing the work despite his friend’s wish that he refrain from doing so. This apology or justification was not meant to be taken seriously by the readers; rather it was a literary device that Oxford used to create an elaborate, lofty, amusing piece of writing while introducing Cardano’s work that has come to be known as the book Hamlet carries with him and reads on stage.
What Oxford produced was a piece of Elizabethan prose that Percy Allen described in the 1930’s as “one of the most gracious that even those days of exquisite writing have bequeathed to us, from the hand of a great nobleman … with its friendship that never condescends, its intimacy that is never familiar, its persuasive logic, its harmonious rhythms, its gentle and compelling charm.” [The Life Story of Edward de Vere as “William Shakespeare” – 1932]
Here is surely the same voice we hear in the Prince of Denmark’s words, Allen noted. Here is prose that sounds like Hamlet’s speech to the common players who arrive at the palace. As Delia Bacon had put it in the 19th century, the author of the play must have been quite like “the subtle Hamlet of the university, the courtly Hamlet, ‘the glass of fashion and the mold of form’” – a description that perfectly fits Lord Oxford in the early 1570’s, when he was in the highest royal favor at the Court of Elizabeth. [The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded – 1857]
Oxford and “Shakespeare” both argue that the possessor of a talent has a duty to use it, that anyone with a virtue has a responsibility to share it with others rather than hoard it for himself alone. The earl writes that if he had failed to publish Bedingfield’s translation he would have “murdered the same in the waste bottoms of my chests.” By contrast his act of causing the work to be published is but a “trifle” to be overcome; and from “Shakespeare” we shall hear the same words within the context of the same theme in the sonnets to Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton:
So the time that keeps you as my chest – Sonnet 52
Shall time’s best jewel from time’s chest lie hid? – Sonnet 65
But thou, to whom my jewels trifles are – Sonnet 48
But beauty’s waste hath in the world an end,
And kept unused the user so destroys it;
No love toward others in that bosom sits
That on himself such murderous shame commits. – Sonnet 9
Oxford rhetorically asks his friend to consider how it avails “a mass of gold to be continually imprisoned in your bags and never to be employed to your use?” What good are Bedingfield’s studies if he chooses to “not participate them to others”? Why would he want to “bury” his works “in the grave of oblivion?”
By new unfolding his imprisoned pride – Sonnet 52
Th’imprisoned absence of your liberty – Sonnet 58
Thou that art now the world’s fresh ornament [“time’s best jewel”]
And only herald to the gaudy spring,
Within thine own bud buriest thy content,
And, tender churl, mak’st waste in niggarding.
Pity the world! Or else this glutton be:
To eat the world’s due, by the grave and thee – Sonnet 1
In Venus and Adonis of 1593, the goddess Venus lectures young Adonis on the same theme using the same words:
What is thy body but a swallowing grave,
Seeming to bury that posterity
Which by the rights of time thou needs must have,
If thou destroy them not in dark obscurity – Venus and Adonis, lines 757-762
Thou art the grave where buried love doth live – Sonnet 31
The Tudor Rose - "That which we call a Rose by any other name would smell as sweet" - Juliet
Oxford enlarges upon his theme:
“What doth avail the tree unless it yield fruit to another … What doth avail the Rose unless another took pleasure in the smell … Why should this Rose be better esteemed than that Rose, unless in pleasantness of smell it far surpassed the other Rose? And so it is in all other things as well as in man. Why should this man be more esteemed than that man, but for his virtue through which every man desireth to be accounted of? Then you amongst men I do not doubt but will aspire to follow that virtuous path, to illuster yourself with the ornaments of virtue…”
And Shakespeare more than two decades later:
What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet
– Romeo and Juliet, 2.2.
But flowers distilled, though they with winter meet,
Lose but their show; their substance still smells sweet.
– Sonnet 5
O how much more doth beauty beauteous seem
By that sweet ornament which truth doth give!
The Rose looks fair, but fairer we it deem
For that sweet odor which doth in it live.
The Canker-blooms have full as deep a dye
As the perfumed tincture of the Roses …
But for their virtue only is their show,
They live unwoo’d, and unrespected fade,
Die to themselves. Sweet Roses do not so:
Of their sweet deaths are sweetest odors made. – Sonnet 54
Oxford writes:
“ … wherein I may seem to you to play the part of the cunning and expert mediciner or Physician, who, though his patient in the extremity of his burning Fever, is desirous of cold liquor or drink to qualify his sore thirst, or rather kill his languishing body …”
And Shakespeare uses the same image:
My love is as a fever longing still
For that which longer nurseth the disease,
Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill,
The uncertain sickly appetite to please:
My reason, the Physician to my love…” – Sonnet 147
And finally, to choose among many such examples, Oxford anticipates one of Shakespeare’s major themes in the Sonnets printed in 1609, the power of his pen to create a “monument” for posterity:
“Again we see if our friends be dead, we cannot show or declare our affection more then by erecting them of Tombs: Whereby when they be dead in deed, yet make we them live as it were again through their monument, but with me behold it happeneth far better, for in your life time I shall erect you such a monument, that as I say in your lifetime you shall see how noble a shadow of your virtuous life shall hereafter remain when you are dead and gone. And in your life time again I say, I shall give you that monument and remembrance of your life…”
Not marble nor the gilded monuments
Of Princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme,
But you shall shine more bright in these contents
Than unswept stone, besmeared with sluttish time.
When wasteful war shall Statues overturn
And broils root out the work of masonry,
Nor Mars his sword nor war’s quick fire shall burn
The living record of your memory.
‘Gainst death and all-oblivious enmity
Shall you pace forth! – Sonnet 55
Oxford and Elizabeth -- the Lord Great Chamberlain of England, carrying the Sword of State, with Queen Elizabeth the First
Your monument shall be my gentle verse,
Which eyes not yet created shall o’er-read,
And tongues to be your being shall rehearse,
When all the breathers of this world are dead.
You still shall live (such virtue hath my pen)
Where breath most breathes, even in the mouths of men.
– Sonnet 81
And thou in this shalt find thy monument,
When tyrants’ crests and tombs of brass are spent – Sonnet 107
So that’s it for No. 11 of 100 reasons why I believe Oxford wrote the works attributed to Shakespeare.
But I’m just warming up, so stay tuned!
(Significant work on Oxford’s public letter to Bedingfield has been done by many Oxfordians including, for example, Gwynneth Bowen in the Shakespearean Authorship Review [England] of spring 1967, reprinted online in Mark Alexander’s Shakespeare Authorship Sourcebook and also in So Richly Spun: Volume 5 of Building the Case for Edward de Vere as Shakespeare , edited by Dr. Paul Altrocchi and yours truly. Also, as mentioned previously, Joseph Sobran included an essay on the letter in an appendix to his book Alias Shakespeare in 1997.)
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